Blogging Nick Piggott

Companies have moved from selling products to selling services. I think it’s time for that model to evolve again.

I’ve worked closely for a very long time with a software company.

At first they sold a product; a set of floppy disks which came with a 1,300 page manual. It was a ragingly successful product, which has been distributed on 5.25″ disks, 3.5″ disks, CD, DVD and now probably available as a download. You installed the product on your own PC, and licensed it. With a “product” comes the burden documentation, and lots of testing on all sorts of different hardware/operating system combinations, and lots of telephone support.

About 5 years ago they developed some functionality which was years ahead of its time. Because it looked rather complicated to most people, and demanded some knowledge of SQL and IIS, they decided to make it available as a service; a service that radio stations could make look like their own by putting their own branding and logos on it. Apparently the only clue that it wasn’t being run directly by the radio station was that it was served from a different IP address.

Quite a lot of companies sell services nowadays. On the premise of rapid deployment, and hassle free operation, they offer an apparently beguiling solution to the problem of keeping up with the market. You can buy content management services, community and networking services, text message services, podcasting services. The common thread is that the functionality is bundled up to the point where you just add colour and logo and link to it.

The difficulty with these bundled service is that you end up with little parcels of functionality all over your site, and it’s very hard to mesh it all together in a way that the user might want to use it. It becomes harder to retain consistency of navigation and behaviour, and if you do want to do a change, it means negotiating with a range of different companies to implement it. And of course you end up with segegrated pots of data and content, which makes it virtually impossible to neatly flow learned behaviours/preferences around your site.

I really liked the functionality that this software company offered us, but really hated the service. It just wasn’t right for what we wanted, and it would have been a major job (and cost) to amend it. So I offered to licence just the core code so that we could integrate the functionality deep into our own systems and sites – and to their enormous credit, they agreed. In fact, it helps them too. They don’t need to create a “product”, and they now don’t need to guess our end-user needs when developing the “service”. And we avoid paying for (and almost certainly unpicking) layers we don’t want or need.

The secret of innovating fast is to make small, incremental, steps quickly. Companies with “clever” are more likely to get a sale by allowing their work to be an incremental building block in someone else’s plan rather than trying to provide the whole shooting match. I think I’ll go mental if another company comes to me with some nice functionality that has yet another “content management system” with it. The sum total of content management systems in any organisation should be one. No higher, no lower. One.

I’d be overjoyed if more companies offered to sell me their “clever”.

(P.S. If you’ve got something clever, do let me know. I might be able to find it a loving home nestled in an existing system).

This is my last post inspired by Broadcast Asia and Singapore.

The story of DAB Digital Radio in Singapore starts almost identically to that in the UK. The launch of DigitalOne was on the 15th November 1999; Singapore launched DAB four days later. Both launches brought a mix of existing, established, analogue services and brand new digital only services. Coverage is pretty good in both places (although I believe Singapore manages to cover it’s population with two transmitters compared to the 120 that DigitalOne uses).

In my opinion, the Singaporean implementation of DAB is more innovative than what we’ve seen in the UK so far. Most of the DAB services have Slideshow visuals, transmitting genuinely useful information, and in addition to the free-to-air DAB from MediaCorp (on two ensembles) , Redeffusion (a nostalgic name to us Brits) also provides a selection of subscription radio via DAB (including Classic fm and FUN Radio from the UK).

The stark divergence between the UK DAB story and the Singaporean DAB story is brought home by a wander round Sim Lim, the consumer electronics mecca. Amongst the hundreds of shops selling virtually every single consumer electronics devices known to man (or indeed, ripped off) I couldn’t find a single DAB Digital Radio device. Not one.

I’ve heard a lot of explanations for this, but many of them highlight the disparity between MediaCorp’s investment in the technology of DAB, but reluctance to enthuse about the benefits of changing from digital to analogue. It’s a common problem, but at some point you have to question the wisdom of investing in a platform you’re not prepared to promote or migrate people to.

I hope that the situation in Singapore changes, because in terms of technology and product, they’re doing many things better than the UK. They just need to get over that final hurdle, and start telling Singaporeans to buy DAB Digital Radios.

There were quite a few interesting things to see at Broadcast Asia, not least the dazzling array of new mobile phone devices heading their way to Europe. You can go for bling, or sleek, or chic or geek. You can get originals from Samsung, LG, SonyEricsson or get knockoffs from ZTE. What’s true for all of them is that it’s highly unlikely that you’ll pay anything like the true cost of them up front. The handset subsidy model is well established across most of the EU states, where you get a £400 / €650 handset for free in return for signing an 18 month contract at typically £30 / €50 a month.

This is relevant when you think about how to transmit radio digitally.

MBMS is a broadcast mode for 3G networks. Using unpaired carriers, it’s possible to simply broadcast multi-cast IP packets to handsets by enabling selected existing 3G sites to transmit the carrier, and creating a Single Frequency Network. (This almost identical in concept to IP Multicasting over DAB Digital Radio). When you lose the multicast carrier, the handset simply swaps back to normal 3G unicast mode and vice versa. This seems like the perfect method for “broadcasting” (streaming) radio to mobile phones, and from the networks’ point of view, it almost certainly is.

Meanwhile, over in France, a decision is being made to transmit radio using a variation of the DMB Mobile TV specification called “DMB Audio“, rather than the existing DAB or DAB+ specifications. DMB Audio is the DMB TV specification “adapted” to remove the requirement to transmit a video component, working on the assumption that (TV – Audio) = Radio. Despite the fact that no other country is showing any interest in this Frankenstein technology (c.f. SECAM), and that it delivers a lousy radio experience, there is one compelling reason to reject it (and MBMS and DVB-H) for radio transmission, and it’s one that everyone seems to have overlooked.

Try building a £30 / €50 kitchen radio for MBMS, DMB Audio or DVB-H.

Whilst these technologies can transmit audio, they’re primarily designed to transmit video and phone calls and a whole load of other things which dramatically raise the lowest point of entry to the technology. That means you simply can’t build a cheap and simple radio that will shift in its millions, and critically, can sell at a reasonable price without a subsidy or a contract. DMB-T is interesting because it was an extension of a simple technology to do a more complicated job. “DMB Audio” is the worst idea ever because it’s a complicated technology only using a portion of its capabilities.

It’s true that most modern digital broadcast systems can carry audio services. But that doesn’t mean they’re good technologies to transmit radio to the population as a whole, technologies that can span cheap radios in kitchens through to fully integrated multi-media receivers in mobile phones.

UBC are launching their CLIQ Music Download service this evening in London. I was hoping to attend, but ended up at the wrong end of the M4.

CLIQ has been in trial for a while with Chrysalis on their Heart 100.7 station in Birmingham. The USP is that CLIQ can download (using DAB data capacity) a DRM-protected file of the song currently playing, which means it can be purchased simply by downloading a (small) licence. It’s positioned as being a simple to use music download service, where you just click the button to buy the song. Indeed, the core idea is the same as Hear It Buy It Burn It which has been running on a number of GCap Media stations for some years.

PURE Digital are supporting CLIQ with the launch of a DAB/WiFI Radio that will feature the service, and they will share a proportion of the revenues of the CLIQ service.

It’s good to see people creating applications that make use of the broadcast nature of DAB Digital Radio data, but I’m not sure that this one will stack up commercially. It’s quite expensive (and difficult) to get hold of data capacity on DAB, and this service is having to speculatively send some quite large binary files out to receivers in the hope that people will buy each song enough to warrant its broadcast. I suspect that the cost of distribution might outweigh the profit from the sales. (There is a “Lite” version where the meta-data of the song is transmitted, and the song download is to your PC, and a Java Applet which runs on a mobile phone and doesn’t use DAB at all).

The requirement is for a back-channel to complete the purchase and deliver the licence means that the device either needs to be tied to the Internet (WiFI) or needs a GSM module. If you’ve got IP connectivity then you have access to a plethora of competitive music services. In particular, mobile phone networks’ own music download services are very competitively priced, which trims the margins available to wafer thin. Any share of nothing is still nothing.

DAB data is tremendously powerful, but its broadcast characteristics means that it’s best suited to applications that have wide audiences and relatively lightweight content. It will be interesting to see how Channel 4’s proposals to use DAB data differ (or otherwise) from the CLIQ model, if they win the second national multiplex licence.

I was at Broadcast Asia last week, so I’m going to be doing some posts this week about interesting things I saw there. I was primarily there to do a presentation with James on the good and bad things about DAB in the UK, but there was plenty to see at Broadcast Asia and in Singapore generally.

The business of building mobile phone networks appears to be extremely competitive. Last year Nokia and Siemens agreed to merge their two network businesses to create a supplier to rival Lucent/Alcatel, and they were exhibiting for the first time as joint entity at Broadcast Asia. (The branding was more Nokia inspired than Siemens, but that’s probably a good thing).

You would expect a network provider to feature hardware pretty heavily on their stand, and so they did (more to follow on the technology known as MBMS). However, rather unexpectedly there was a pod dedicated to explaining a new network technology aimed at inserting advertising into mobile internet browsing.

My initial thoughts were “oh no, the pop-up comes to mobile”, and certainly the host of the pod was very enthusiastic about the possibilities of injecting advertising, on a targeted basis, into people’s mobile browsing. Given the pressure on margins for the hardware, and the seemingly endless enthusiasm for the advertising model, maybe it shouldn’t be a surprise to see such an idea from Nokia Siemens.

On reflection, not only is it an unwelcome idea (from a pure irritation point of view), I think it could be absolutely fatally flawed and call into question some principles that ISPs and Telecoms providers have held very very dear for a long time.

The principle of Common Carrier allows telecoms networks (fixed and mobile) to claim indemnity from the content that they carry – in simple terms, they can’t get into trouble if I send you some content that’s illegal. Whilst that occasionally gets tested at the boundaries, the principle is fairly solid, and it’s what differentiates a Carrier from a Publisher.

But this idea to inject advertising dangerously muddies the waters for the telecoms companies. How can they claim to be a passive carrier of data when they start to actively inspect it in order to insert advertising? And if they start to inspect the content in order to deliver context sensitive advertising, that surely puts them in a very dangerous position of “knowing” what they’re carrying?

What would happen if this idea was applied to DAB Digital Radio networks? The radio station gets a discounted/free transmission network, but now the transmission provider is injecting their own ads in at the transmitter to pay for the network. I’m not sure many radio companies would take that idea seriously – selling their adverts knowing that someone else is going to be inserting adverts too.

I suspect this idea won’t get implemented. Aside from the very fundamental problem of potentially making the network liable for everything that gets passed over it, it will also probably break all those lovely Web 2.0 / AJAX sessions, which will annoy users almost as much as random adverts popping up everywhere. I just remain amazed at how these ideas can get as far as a public exhibition.